All sorts of geeky goodness this weekend. I flashed my WRT54GS router with the DD-WRT open source firmware. I signed up for free dynamic DNS. After configuring the router for dynamic dns, giving my desktop machine a static IP through DHCP, and setting up some port forwarding,, and installing privoxy and openssh on my desktop (and letting port 22 through my firewall,) all I needed for secure web browsing on my laptop over insecure wifi networks was to configure Firefox to use localhost port 8118 for all protocols through manual proxy configuration and to establish an ssh tunnel on my laptop, like so:

ssh -L 8118:localhost:8118 mydesktopsdomain.org

On this first go-round, I neglected to consider that I could have left out a couple of steps by just ssh tunneling through the router.

I love how technology makes my life so much easier!